


As Absolute and Pure as Death

by naberiie



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Afterlife, Crush at First Sight, F/M, Getting Together, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 09:53:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20387785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naberiie/pseuds/naberiie
Summary: Back and arms dotted with gooseflesh that Fives knew wasn’t from the freezing water, he couldn’t help but grin sheepishly into the palms of his hands at the thought of Rabé Bhutia’s smile. Her smile as she stood over him, extended a hand to help him up, and accepted her victory in their sparring match.He couldn’t help but smile, and Fives knew he was already lost.[Or, Fives has never wanted to hold a handso badin his whole entire life.]





	As Absolute and Pure as Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evaceratops](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evaceratops/gifts).

> War in Elysium is Eva's afterlife AU. Everyone is alive and also extremely traumatized, worlds and timelines crash into each other, and it's great fun. Also! This is where arcmaiden got started, so this was such a fun trip down memory lane... Thank you Eva!!

Today, Fives was exceptionally grateful for the fact that the showers on Aphelion always started out with a blinding blast of near-frozen water. It redirected his blistering, overheating nerves and, ironically, gave him a moment to catch his breath. Something he’d been struggling with for an hour now.

_“You want to spar with me?”_

_“If you’re not afraid of a challenge, of course.”_

He pressed his face into his hands at the way she’d stared at him, calculating, hands on her hips. And then laughed.

_“I’m not afraid of a challenge. Are you?”_

Back and arms dotted with gooseflesh that he knew wasn’t from the freezing water, he couldn’t help but grin sheepishly into the palms of his hands at the thought of Rabé Bhutia’s smile. Her smile as she stood over him, extended a hand to help him up, and accepted her victory in their sparring match.

He couldn’t help but smile, and as the water gradually turned from arctic blasts into snowmelt, Fives knew he was already lost.

He wanted to make her laugh again, more than anything in the world.

And… and now he had all the time in the world to do it.

* * *

They all had scars. Literal and figurative, physical and emotional. There was a perfectly round white mark in the center of Fives’ chest, a medal of honor to match the thin line on his right temple. General Secura never wore anything that showed them, but Fives knew that she had a firework display of blaster marks over every inch of her back. Bly’s attempt to be merciful, to euthanize the woman he loved as quickly as possible, even through the overwhelming fog of the chip. Queen Amidala massaged her throat when she was stressed, Echo tapped out SOS-SOS-SOS as an unconscious tick, the sound echoing faintly around the barracks in the dead of night, and Tup would sometimes just… drift. His eyes would go cloudy, distant, and the best they could do for him was sit him on a soft surface until it passed.

Everyone bore the marks of their death.

By the time the trio of Naboo handmaidens had sniffed out their monarch among this galaxy of living ghosts far adrift from any sense of linear time, it was an automatic gesture to quickly pass eyes over everyone you met, to see what their scars could tell you. Nothing more than a simple bit of healthy morbid curiosity: _how did you get here?_

Rabé and Eirtaé had matching blast burns on their chests – he’d noticed them yesterday, when the 501st and the handmaidens had accidentally signed up for the same training room at the same time and had made the best of it – but it was Sabé, their dark and intimidating Captain, that confused Fives. As far as he could tell, she bore no mark of death anywhere on her body. It wasn’t until he’d asked Ahsoka about it later that he realized it was because she’d been on Alderaan.

He almost wanted to ask her, if it sat uneasily with her, the fact that Alderaan once more hung in the stars above them. Perfect, untouched, an entire planet of ghosts in more ways than one.

It wasn’t considered polite, though, to ask about death marks.

But he’d tell Rabé, if she asked. He hoped she would think him brave.

* * *

“…don’t even know if she’s _into_ guys at all! Like, would she even be into _me – _is that stupid? Echo, you’d tell me if I were being stupid, ri-”

“You’re being so _fucking _stupid, Fives,” came the instantaneous response. “Suck it up, trooper, and ask her out.”

Fives pressed his pillow over his face even harder than before and sighed. They’d been at it for an hour now, and Fives didn’t feel anywhere near confident enough to just march down the hall and ask Rabé if she wanted to…

He almost lied to himself in thinking, _where the hell could we even go on this ball of ice that would make for a good first date_, because he’d already thought about it. He already knew.

He’d take as many blankets as he could find and a self-heating thermos of hot chocolate up to one of the peaks. They’d spend the whole day hiking up there, just… relaxing in each other’s company. Talking. He’d take her hand to help her over a shaky section of the trail even though he knew that she could handle herself, and besides, the thought of taking her hand even a little bit, at all, for _any_ reason, was enough to send his heart into cardiac arrest.

He groaned quietly into his pillow, his stomach ricocheting in excitement and nerves at the thought of her hand in his. He was absolutely certain her hand would be strong and as calloused as his own. She’d practiced with a long Nabooian spear after finishing hand-to-hand combat.

It was like watching a dancer.

Fives curled up on his side. Thinking about holding her hand made his mouth dry, it made his lungs stall for breath. Face still pressed into his pillow, voice all but muffled as he whispered softly, “_…_I really… I really like her, Echo...”

Below him, his batch brother gave a tiny, fondly exasperated sigh. “I know, Fives. I know.”

* * *

The handmaidens were early risers, just like the troopers, and the Jedi, and Queen Amidala – okay, so everyone on Aphelion woke with the sun, but it still made Fives’ heart flutter in his chest when he rounded the corner to the mess one morning to get first shot at breakfast and saw the three women sitting at a table, quietly talking over gently steaming cups of fresh caff.

His legs stopped working, and before he could duck back around the corner and hide, Rabé glanced up and saw him, and – _oh, Force, oh all gods_ – she smiled.

“Good morning, Fives! Do you want to sit with us?”

_Yes. Yes yes yes yes y-_

“Oh, I uh – I’m just grabbing some bagels for, uhm, Kix- no, Jesse-” He blabbered, grabbing at the first thing he saw and desperately wishing he could just sink into the ground.

Eirtaé raised her eyebrows, and Rabé’s face dropped a little, and somewhere deep in Fives’ head there was a perfect tiny replica of Echo screaming at him to get his act together and sit with them, but all logical operations were currently being overridden by the sirens of absolute flustered panic because _she smiled at me_.

“Oh… okay! We’re leaving on a mission soon… maybe after?” She asked, hopefully looking up at him – and then he ran right into a bench at a nearby table on his panicked rush out of the mess –

But not before his tongue loosened and he grinned as big and as natural as he could and nodded and said, maybe a bit too loudly, “Yes! It’s a date!”

Rabé blinked, and then she snorted and laughed, and Fives didn’t even notice he’d grabbed six muffins until he was facedown on Echo’s bunk and it didn’t even matter that the others were yelling at him or that he had a nasty bruise blooming across his shins, because he’d made her _laugh_, she’d laughed and it was the most beautiful sound in the galaxy.

“She probably thinks you’re an _idiot_, Fives, and she’d be _right-”_

He grinned into the pillow, because it didn’t even matter. Sure, maybe he’d embarrassed himself beyond all hope, but…

He’d made her laugh.

That’s all that mattered.

* * *

“They’re not back yet, Fives,” Shaak Ti said with a near-imperceptible smile as she came to stand next to him, looking out of the window that looked out across their neatly maintained landing bay. “Sabé has been in contact with Queen Amidala and said things are going well, though. She said they’ll be back tomorrow.”

He cleared his throat, trying to pretend that’s not exactly what he’d been on the lookout for, that he’d taken literally every excuse to walk by this window every hour for the past day, and Shaak Ti just smiled at him. “You should relax. She’s fine.”

The heat crawled across his face, and he turned back towards the window.

* * *

“Fives - need a sparring partner?”

Fives almost dropped the Nabooian spear as he spun on his heels, face burning, to see Rabé’s gentle, sleepy smile as she all but danced into the otherwise empty training room. The instructional hologram he’d been using dissipated, leaving the room quiet. “S-sure,” he said, stumbling even over that simple word.

Rabé held out her hand for the spear and smiled again when he placed it in her palms. She tested its weight, ran her hand up the length of the shaft, and then laughed. “This one is too small for you! Look – it should be about a head taller than you are. This one is more my size. Let’s get you another one.”

He followed her like a man dying of thirst, and when she found one that was better suited to his height, she thumbed blade of the smaller spear and asked softly, eyes thoroughly fixated on her shoes, “And… and how about that muffin date afterwards?”

Fives’ grip on his own spear tightened, his mouth went dry, and his heart was all but singing as he stumbled over, “Yes, absolutely!”

Her eyes shot up and she beamed as bright as powerful as a hundred million stars and his knees almost crumpled underneath him, and he knew his smile was big enough to match hers.

All the time in the world, all the time in the world to make her smile, and laugh, and maybe, eventually, to hold her hand. To hold _her_.

They had all the time in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://naberiie.tumblr.com/), [twitter](https://twitter.com/naberiie)


End file.
